Peer-to-peer computing enables users to share computing resources and content, and to communicate with one other directly. Familiar peer-to-peer services today are NetMeeting® of Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, Wash.), and Napster® of Napster, Inc. (Redwood City, Calif.). NetMeeting is used for text, voice and video chat between two users, and Napster is used for sharing music files.
Peer-to-peer computing eliminates the need to upload content and communicate through a central host web server, thereby saving time, effort and expense. Especially with the proliferation of mobile computing devices, such as PDAs, cell-phones, peer-to-peer computing is becoming more and more prevalent, and more and more of a modus operandus.
However, at its early stage of adoption today, peer-to-peer computing suffers from (i) lack of an integrated development tool for building a variety of peer-to-peer services within a single application; (ii) lack of flexibility in managing multiple peer-to-peer services, each service intended for a different community of users; (iii) lack of privacy; and (iv) lack of richness in imagery.